


Chasing Memories

by SectoBoss



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, McGucket's losing his mind, Memory Erasing Gun, Memory Loss, Stan needs help, set just after Ford disappears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 08:56:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4385687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stanley Pines needs all the help he can get if he’s to get the portal working again. He knows that a man called McGucket helped his brother design it, so surely he can help him rescue Ford? Except McGucket hasn’t been himself for a long time now, and getting answers will not be easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasing Memories

_This has to be the right house_ , Stan thought, looking down again at the scribbled note in his hand. _32 Opossum Court_. _This is where he lives.  
_

The woman in the convenience store had been most insistent when he had shown her the picture. “Ooh, yes,” she’d crooned, grabbing the cheap Polaroid out of his hands and holding it up to the light. “I remember that gentleman, yes. Popped by for some bread and milk every now and then, you know? Very nice gentleman he was too, very polite, very _proper_.” The way she’d emphasised the word proper implied that she thought it was a commodity in short supply these days.

Stan had met her type before. She was one of those middle-aged women who seemed to be a reservoir of all the small-town gossip and who you could never imagine being younger than forty-five. Stan was just thankful she didn’t ask why the photo of the man he’d shown her had been ripped in half, as if it had originally been a picture of two people. Because then he’d have to lie and say he’d found the picture like that, and women like her could _smell_ lies like that one. They were all the same, he reflected bitterly, up and down America: a hidden army of ageing women who between them probably knew every secret in the nation. Always the first to gossip about a stranger in town, always trying to find out everything they could about everyone they met.

She’d started rambling on about how polite a gentleman the man in the photo had been – “he even called me ma’am once, made me feel like royalty!” she crowed – but eventually he had managed to get a name and an address out of her. Why or how this woman knew the addresses of her customers, Stan didn’t want to ask.

_Fiddleford H. McGucket_

_32 Opossum Court  
_

He’d known the name already, of course. It had been scattered all over his brother’s paperwork, scrawled on letters and in diaries and down the sides of strange blueprints. Fiddleford McGucket, engineer, invited up to Gravity Falls by Dr Stanford Pines to help him with research and construction of… that _thing_. For some reason they’d had a falling out months ago, and from what Stan could gather McGucket and his brother hadn’t spoken in a long time. But still, he was Stan’s best hope for finding out where his brother had gone. And, more importantly, how to get him back.

And now he had an address.

He looked up again from the crumpled bit of paper in his gloved hand and squinted at the building in front of him. It certainly didn’t look like the house of a genius inventor. Truth be told, it wasn’t a house at all – just another ramshackle trailer in a dilapidated trailer park over on the poorer side of town. They lined up in strict, regimented rows all around him like they had been parachuted into place by some bizarre military operation twenty years ago and left to rot since then. Not even the light dusting of late-December snow that had covered the town last night could pretty the place up – while the Gravity Falls main street now looked like something out of a Christmas postcard, Opossum Court just looked cold and miserable under the iron-grey sky and dirty, mud-streaked snow.

He sighed and watched as the mist of his breath diffused away into the air. He should be so hard on the place, he thought. After all, he’d spent half a year living in a place like this one down in the Florida panhandle. He wouldn’t soon forget 100-degree heat in an aluminium box one sweltering July afternoon, blinking the sweat out of his eyes and waiting for a knock on the door that, thank God in his heaven, never came.

Stan shook his head, forcing the memories away, and started towards the trailer door. Snow crunched under his boots and his nylon parka swished as he moved his arms. In his head, he rehearsed what he was going to say when Fiddleford opened the door.

_Hi! No, I’m not Ford, I’m Stan! His twin brother.  
_

Would Ford have ever mentioned him, Stan wondered. Surely in over a year he must have let slip he had a twin brother?

_I need to talk to you about that machine in the basement. The one you helped build. The one I accidentally threw my own brother into, and he never came back out._

Stan scowled. He didn’t even know what that thing was _called_. The wooden steps to the front door went tap-creak as he climbed them. Was it a gateway? A portal? He had seen words on blueprints he had dug out from his brother’s records, words like ‘transdimensional’ and ‘metavortex’ and other, longer ones he couldn’t begin to remember. They might as well have been written in Russian.

 _You’d need to be a genius to understand them,_ he thought bitterly to himself. _And the only genius for miles around, you went and threw into that damn thing. Well done. Genius.  
_

He stopped outside the trailer door and steeled himself. He could hear the faint sounds of a radio coming from inside, and he felt relief that there was at least someone at home. _No matter what bad blood there was between Ford and this guy, I need to get him to help me._

He raised his gloved fist and rapped sharply on the glass of the door.

Inside the trailer, the radio stopped abruptly. Stan heard footsteps slowly creak across the floor towards the door, as if whoever was inside was trying to sneak over and doing a bad job of it. The glass at the top of the door darkened as the person looked through the peephole below it. _It’s a good job I’m not the debt collectors, friend,_ Stan thought. _You’re terrible at this._

“Who… who is it?” came a wavering voice from the other side of the cheap plywood.

“My name’s Stan Pines,” Stan called back. “Stanley! Stanley Pines, I’m Stanford’s brother. I’m not Stanford! I need to talk to you, Fiddleford.”

There was a long pause. “I don’t know any Stanford Pines. Nor any Stanley Pines neither. Go away!”

Stan’s jaw dropped open. “Wait, no!” he shouted. “I need to talk to you! Fiddleford, right? Fiddleford McGucket? I know you worked with my brother, I need your help! Can you open the door? Please?”

Another long pause. Then the rattle of a lock being undone. The door swung open as far as its security chain would allow, and Stanley got his first good look at the man who was his last hope for ever seeing Ford again. He tried not to let his shock and disappointment show on his face.

Fiddleford was a mess. If the old Polaroids Stan had found in his brother’s folders were anything to go by the man had never been what you’d call photogenic, but now he looked like a wreck. The photos had shown a young man with messy brown hair and a goofy expression peering out at the world through pebble-thick glasses. The man in front of him looked like he might be the father of the man in the photographs, if he had lost all his money in a seedy gambling house and turned to the bottle to drown out the bad memories. The face peering out at him through the dark crack between door and frame was as pale as the dirty snow that covered the ground around the trailer, and there were thick black bags under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in a year. His glasses were askew on his face and Stan noticed a small hairline crack running up one of the lenses. Fiddleford’s crumpled and stained clothes hung off him like rags, making him look like a badly-made scarecrow – an illusion not helped by the straggly, greasy hair that stuck out from the top of his head like thatch.

A waft of air from inside the trailer reached Stan’s nostrils. Mildew and old food and sweat. He scrunched up his nose and tried to surreptitiously breathe through his mouth.

“Look here, I don’t know what you’re-a on about, stranger,” McGucket said, his expression nervous. “Whatever you’re selling, I’m afraid I ain’t buying.” He made to shut the door, but Stan was too quick for him. Lightning-fast, he jammed the toe of his boot into the gap between the door and the frame and leaned forward.

“Look,” he said in a lower voice, suddenly realising that he’d rather not have Fiddleford’s neighbours hear him yelling about portals and experiments gone wrong. “You’re Fiddleford McGucket, right?”

The other man nodded, once, a quick and frightened gesture that reminded Stan of a trapped animal.

“You worked with my twin brother, Stanford Pines.” Fiddleford opened his mouth to say something but Stan ploughed on. “Up in the log cabin in the forest. You helped him design some… machine. A portal, of some kind. Right?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fiddleford muttered nervously. He tried ineffectually to shut the door.

Stan looked around him. This McGucket guy was clearly unstable, and he could _really_ do with not making a scene. He turned back to Fiddleford and shivered theatrically. “Cold out here,” he said. “Could I come in?”

Again Fiddleford looked like he was about to say something. This time Stan said nothing, but looked very pointedly at the security chain. He knew from personal experience how useless those things were. About the only thing they kept secure was the peace of mind of idiots – a single well-placed kick would snap the links or even pop the whole thing out of the frame. Fiddleford followed Stan’s gaze, and seemed to come to a similar realisation. “I guess I could offer you a coffee,” he muttered.

Stan removed his boot and the door closed. He heard the clatter of the chain being removed and then it swung open again. Another blast of hot, slightly foetid air billowed out to meet him. He winced and stepped over the threshold.

The inside of the trailer, he saw as McGucket closed the door behind him, resembled its owner. Clothing and food wrappers were strewn across the floor and dirty dishes were piled high in a sink filled to the brim with stagnant water. The curtains were drawn and the only light came from a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, which was encrusted with the remains of dead flies. A thick layer of dust covered every horizontal surface and here and there the paint had flaked off the walls, leaving the rusty metal of the trailer to peer though like skullbone through a head wound. Stan grimaced. _This is the home of a genius engineer?_ he thought to himself. _Looks more like a crack den._

McGucket bustled away, clattering around in the trailer’s tiny kitchen, looking for a clean mug or two and whistling tunelessly. Stan considered sitting down on one of the threadbare chairs that were scattered around, but decided against it when he saw the vicious-looking springs jutting out of them. His gaze wandered around the room, his mind recoiling at the squalor, when all of a sudden he spotted something. He gasped with excitement.

It was a piece of paper tacked to the wall. On it, McGucket had drawn a triangle, point down, with a circle in the middle and flanked by four ovals. _The machine!_ Stan strode over and yanked it off of the wall. It was a crude diagram of it, but it was surely proof that McGucket had worked on it!

“So you did work with my brother!” he called through to the kitchen, where Fiddleford was standing around aimlessly like he had forgotten what he had gone in there for. He jumped slightly at Stan’s shout, and looked around wildly. “This is the machine you two made!”

Fiddleford squinted at the piece of paper Stan was waving at him. “I… I don’t rightly recall, stranger,” he stammered. “I wish I could help you, but I don’t know any Simon Pines-”

“ _Stanford!”_ Stanley roared, anger and frustration briefly getting the better of him. “ _His name is Stanford!_ ”

Fiddleford cringed at Stan’s outburst and held his hands up in a pleading gesture. “P-Please, mister, I… I don’t know you, or your brother.”

“Then how do you explain this, then? Eh?” Stan demanded, advancing on Fiddleford and brandishing the portal diagram. “This is the machine you two designed! For God’s sake, man, why won’t you just admit it?” Stan could feel his temper beginning to slip, anger sparking inside him like the spray from a grindstone. His brother was gone, to God-knows-where, and this _idiot_ was playing games with him!

“Look,” he said, trying to calm down. “You worked with my brother. You helped him design this thing. I know you and Ford parted on bad terms, but I need your help! He’s gone, the portal turned on and sucked him in, and I need to get him back and you’re the only one who can help me!” His expression was pleading now. Desperately, he rooted around in his jacket pocket and pulled out the half-photo he had shown to the woman in the convenience store. “That’s you, right?” he said, pointing of the photo of the man before him in happier times. “That’s you! And that’s the portal, right behind you! I know you worked on it, and I know you know how it works, and I’m begging you. Fiddleford, I’m _begging_ you, please help me! I have to get Ford back!”

He stopped, out of breath and out of steam, watching the man in front of him for any hint of recognition or understanding. Fiddleford took the photo and studied it with an almost queasy expression. “Mighty strange,” he muttered at last. “I’d swear that’s me in this here photo, but I just don’t recall ever having it taken.” He looked up at Stan with a nervous grin on his face. “Is this some kind of computer trickery? Are you about to sell me some kind of magic camera-doohickey?”

Stan honestly didn’t mean to lose his temper.

But before he knew what he was doing his fist had balled itself and shot out as if of its own accord, and all of a sudden McGucket was lying on the floor with blood pouring from his mouth and a few shards of tooth enamel glittering wetly on the carpet next to him. Stan stared dumbly down at him as the pain from his own knuckles slowly started to seep up his arm. _Did I… did I just hit him?_ he wondered stupidly.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry!” he gasped, as Fiddleford cowered away from him, curling up into a ball and trembling in the corner. “Are you ok?”

“ _Get away from me!_ ” the other man screeched, his voice muffled by the hand he had clamped over his own lips to stem to blood flow. “ _Please, just take whatever you want! I don’t have much, please! Just leave me alone!_ ”

“No, no, I don’t…” Stan tried to explain lamely, but there was nothing he could say that would get past the terror and confusion in McGucket’s eyes, and he knew it. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled again.

Fiddleford moaned in pain. “Go away! I don’t know your brother and I don’t know about this machine! I don’t know anything!” His voice became a howl and a mad look crept into his face. _“I don’t remember! I don’t remember anything anymore!”_

To his shame, Stan fled. He crashed out of the door and was sprinting halfway to the trailer park gates before he found the presence of mind to slow down so he wouldn’t look like a burglar. McGucket’s sobs and screams rang in his head as he pulled up his hood and stuffed his hands into his pockets. Turning the corner out of the gate, he began the long walk back towards the cabin.

 _Can’t remember?_ he thought as he walked. _Fine! I don’t need your help, you crazy old coot! I don’t need anyone’s help! I’ll get Ford back on my own if I have to!_

* * *

 

Back in the trailer, unwanted memories flocked around Fiddleford McGucket like a swarm of horrid bats.

He looked again at the photo the stranger had shoved into his hands. Him, stood in front of half a machine he didn’t recognise, looking into the camera and grinning hugely.

He look also at a scrap of paper that the stranger had dropped as he stormed out. A man who looked identical to the stranger but for his glasses, stood in front of the other half of the machine, grinning just as widely as Fiddleford.

Two halves made a whole as he pushed them together across the grimy floor.

And on the back of the Polaroid, scribbled in black biro:

_Two guys out to change the world!!_

_Stanford P. and Fiddleford McG._

_7/4/81_

Almost without realising it, he reached underneath one of the battered chairs and pulled out a device that at first glance might have been mistaken for a gun. Burnished brass felt cold to the touch beneath his fingers and banks of dials and bulbs glowed softly. Tenderly, he changed the necessary settings and pointed the device at his temple.

Surely one more time couldn’t hurt?


End file.
